Chapter 4 - Building the Case
Laura Chen never promised that divorce would be quick, clean, or fair.
She promised something better.
“Facts,” she said, tapping her legal pad. “We build this on facts.”
Her office overlooked downtown Pittsburgh beneath a steel-gray late-winter sky.
Emily was eleven days old and asleep in a carrier beside my chair.
I hadn’t slept more than two consecutive hours in over a week, yet I remembered every word Laura said.
Because for years, Derek had trained me to doubt my memory.
He denied things I’d clearly heard.
Called me dramatic, oversensitive, forgetful.
If I showed him a text, he said I’d misunderstood the tone.
If I repeated his exact words, he laughed and asked whether pregnancy had damaged my brain.
Laura didn’t care about tone.
She cared about records.
We started with the bank statements.
The transfers totaled $43,700 over fourteen months.
Some went into an account I never knew existed.
Others went to a brokerage account in Derek’s name.
Laura told me not to assume the money was gone.
“Marital assets do not become separate property just because one spouse hides them,” she said.
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She also told me to change every password I controlled, obtain copies of tax returns, preserve Derek’s messages, and write down the dates of major incidents while my memory was fresh.
For three days, I did exactly that.
